The Routineless Routine

Sam Harris

After the birth of our first daughter Uma, my wife and I began to seriously discuss a change in lifestyle. I was becoming disillusioned by the increasingly commercial nature of the majority of my work. I felt I had become too formulaic and I craved something more honest. It was late 2002 when I abandoned my career and we bought one-way tickets to India. We set off with an open mind and open hearts.

We travelled slowly and simply for several years between India and Australia. At this time I adopted digital photography and I also began the process of turning my camera inwards …

Time is the ultimate luxury. In India time seems almost elastic to me, certainly circular and not linear. I wanted to fuse this notion with one of an intimate photo diary of our experiences. The Routineless Routine, in many ways, represents a time of photographic and personal transition.

It was a time of undoing, searching and self-discovery. The result is a photographic sketch of our personal journey, in times when we lived very simply in several villages across India as well as camping and road tripping across Australia.

All images from the series, The Routineless Routine, 2003-2004, Digital